Source: Baugh & Cable
- vocabulary, borrowings
- meaning changes: e.g. Shakespeare's nice = foolish
- pronounciation changes: stan -> stone, cu -> cow
- grammatical changes: analogy
- 497 million speakers of English, cf.:
- Mandarin 1,025 m.
- Spanish 409 m.
- Russian 279 m.
- Portuguese 187m.
- German, 126 m.
- French 127 m.
- language dominance and economic, technological factors
- relation of population growth and language use
- lingua franca
- growth of English as second language (300 million+ speakers) and as pidgin or creole
- artificial international languages, e.g. Volapuk, Esperanto, lack of success; patriotism and nationalistic feelings have worked against such experiments
Germanic language (same language branch as German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian)
over half its words come from Latin
capacity for assimilation, adaptability, flexibility, inflectional simplicity (low degree of "markedness"), loss of grammatical gender, relative ease of learning, mixed vocabulary
borrowings from many languages, some examples:
incompatibility of spelling and pronunciation
extensive use of idioms
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